Good Yuntif, Gmar Tov

I remember a sermon from 45 or 50 years ago, which has stuck with me ever since. Rabbi Harold Stern of Congregation B'nai Emunah in Skokie noted that since Yom Kippur fell on Shabbat that year, we would not blow the shofar. He was initially apologetic, because he knew the children loved the dramatic sound of the ram's horn, and perhaps the thrill of that ancient clarion call was the biggest compensation they received for sitting obediently in temple all day, in dress-up clothes, through the mostly Hebrew service.

B'nai Emunah was a Conservative Congregation, not Reformed, but it had a large number of "three-day-a-year Jews." Most people fasted on Yom Kippur, or at least pretended to. The kids got out of school for the High Holy Days. Many of their mothers kept kosher homes, but they went out to restaurants for dinner and didn't always mind cheeseburgers. The men were of the "greatest generation" who fought through France or drove Higgins boats to Pacific beaches and then, having survived, returned home to obediently make money and babies for America. Some of them worked on Saturday.

Harold Stern was a very capable religious scholar, but he was an absolutely brilliant politician. His congregation was wealthy and large, and he was paid very well for many years, despite growing cultural cynicism and the youth rebellion that was in full flower by the time my wife and I were in high school. Stern later convinced the mother of a close friend not to attend her daughter's wedding because it wasn't Jewish; and in 1975 he told my wife and me that if I didn't go through elaborate rituals and grueling study to properly convert to Judaism (which he made a point of saying he wouldn't recommend anyway), then he would never officiate at our wedding. He was sort of a Jewish version of Richard J. ("shoot to maim") Daley or George Wallace to us. It seemed incomprehensible that he could get away with being so arrogant and mean, and yet be so respected for so long by our parents.    

The ultimate crowning-blow offense was when Rabbi Stern was appointed to officiate at my wife's grandmother's funeral. He refused to even consider any statements or recollections by family members as part of the memorial. These were people who had loved the deceased Bubbie all their lives, but Stern insisted that he knew what to say and he didn't need or want any advice or suggestions from anybody.

In retrospect, Harold Stern ruled his flock of almost 1000 families with guilt. They knew they were not Jewish enough and their children would be even less Jewish. Their parents and grandparents were frowning on them from their graves. They had somehow left it to the Orthodox to replace the Six Million. B'nai Emunah's people would remain negligent in many duties, despite their rabbi's best efforts. They were ignobly assimilated, and the congregation finally merged with another shortly after the end of the Twentieth Century. Perhaps ironically, its architecturally beautiful building was sold to an Assyrian foundation, and it now hosts classes teaching an ancient Middle Eastern language that is not Hebrew.

Nevertheless, that one sermon about why we don't blow the shofar when Yom Kippur comes on Shabbat established Rabbi Stern as an important religious figure for me. Blowing the ram's horn is itself work; but what of carrying it  to and from the synagogue? We are commanded to "Do no work!" on the sabbath; and we are also told to blow the shofar at the conclusion of the Day of Atonement. How do we choose which is the more important duty?

In God's eyes, the heroic, dramatic actions performed rarely or just once a year are not as holy as the routine weekly disipline. It's the ordinary, not the extraordinary stuff that counts most. We can dream all we want to about winning the lottery or an epic battle. But in the final analysis our happiness comes from mundane production of value added each week in life. If we can create our world in six days, then on the seventh we should rest: create time, plan for that weekly sabbath, not Christmas and New Years.

The current thrall of psychedelic drugs, and psychiatry's broader apotheosis of the brain, show our continuing human demand for a short-cut or a catalyst to give us mental health and spiritual salvation without a necessity for religious work and study, and tedious planning and collaboration. This is precisely the wrong instinct. 

The "miracle of modern medicine" is a graven image. Psychiatry is the golden calf most offensive to God.

Have an easy fast and keep the sabbath holy.

The Ruffin-Tibbets Century

I'm not sure how to relate this idea to mental health or Elgin Mental Health Center or Gustavo Rodriguez, but if you can bear with me, I'll try.

On April 12, 1861 at Charleston Harbor, Edmund Ruffin, having paid good money for the privilege, fired the first cannon shot against Fort Sumter, thereby opening the American Civil War. Ruffin was a wealthy planter who served in the Virginia State Senate, and a fanatically ideological proponent of African slavery, who truly believed (along with perhaps half the population of the United States at the time) that the Antebellum South's "peculiar institution" was ordained by God. 

In only a few years, Ruffin's view had been decisively proven wrong, and Abraham Lincoln expressed a different version of God's will: that every drop of blood ever drawn by slavery's lash should be repaid with another drawn by the sword. At Shiloh, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Cold Harbor, Antietam, the Wilderness, and on so many other bloody fields, Lincoln's version of God's will was grotesquely done. The United States was not the same country after that inferno.

A bit more than four score and four years after Ruffin's demonstration of his faith at Charleston, on August 6, 1945, Paul Tibbets flew an American B-29 bomber named after his mother to Japan and killed more than 150,000 people with a single bomb. Tibbets never regretted doing this duty and later wrote, "Morality, there is no such thing in warfare. I don't care whether you are dropping atom bombs, 100-pound bombs, or shooting a rifle. You have got to leave the moral issue out of it."

Only a few days after Tibbets had facilitated the final end of World War II, the United States effectively ruled the world. American ideals and political philosophy had only a single competitor, which American leaders quickly understood as a new existential threat they called "Godless Communism." But the planet was not the same, and morality was a very different subject, after humanity had arrived at a godlike ability to destroy everything and literally end the history of our species.

This century (84 years), bracketed by Ruffin's and Tibbets' separate dramas, was a pivotal moment in the far longer saga of Abrahamic faith irregularly collaborating with scientific reason. Humanity always wanted an Authority higher, or a necessary factual frame more real, than ourselves. We no longer have that. Our story, from the binding of Isaac to the Manhattan Project, is over. (Now we have such a weird thing as so-called "artificial intelligence," and we somehow convince ourselves to be terrified of our own created machines.)

The whole world is new, and it's a frickin' mess. This startles us and dismays us. It reduces our ability to live, partly because we do not recognize what has occurred. The old story is over. The Christian "golden rule" and mathematics alike have become almost irrelevant. We must create new things from scratch.

The way this probably applies to EMHC is, you guys can forget about anyone (and I must say, especially Gus!) believing you're even trying to help. They have learned that "help" means control and betrayal as much as anything else. You can also forget about anyone thinking your professional skills and your education give you any knowledge that they should be interested in. It's just too obvious to all these days, that "you don't know shit" and neither does anyone else. I don't suggest people are right in those attitudes, only that those are their attitudes.

What's necessary is a thing called two-way communication. In his book, Dianetics 1955, L. Ron Hubbard explained it as a very specific formula, a technical action that can be learned and drilled: "cause, distance, effect, with intention and attention, and duplication at effect of what emanates from cause," going first in one direction and then reversing to go in the opposite direction, between two people.

The easiest thing a person does is change his/her mind. In the interests of a better game, any of us will change our mind at the drop of a hat, and we can just as easily change it back if the new offered game doesn't turn out to be as good as we had hoped. Every problem, every conflict or unpleasantness, is dependent upon an absence or failure of two-way communication; when that absence or failure is remedied things get better, life gets better in any circumstance.

The current political culture of intolerant rage has everyone on a hair trigger to dismiss, fight and hate another person the moment they are revealed to be, e.g., a Democrat or an antipsychiatrist, at which time all communication must be refused. It's a hopeless, losing strategy.

The successful influencer does not promote their own opinion with magical power: they understand and suitably acknowledge the opinions they encounter in the world, and they create from those viewpoints of other people, at least until those other people know they are understood, until they become less anxious about changing their own minds and therefore more willing to turn the communication around.

Here's the real connection to mental health. Force is the ultimate losing strategy. The Ruffin-Tibbets Century finally taught humanity that exact lesson. Manipulating brains with drugs or electricity is force and it makes things worse. Only two-way communication by individuals unafraid of force changes minds and improves conditions.

You guys have law and guns, but if you can't change minds by communication alone, you will certainly lose.

And that's the lesson of history!

"Good psychiatry" is oxymoronic, "bad psychiatry" is redundant

The etymology or roots of the word psychiatry (psyche + iatry) suggest that this subclass of physicians can, or intends, to doctor the soul. However, they also deny that such a thing as the soul exists; they say the only thing that is real is the brain. 

I am quite sure more psychiatrists would claim to be brain doctors than would claim to be soul doctors. Years ago I attended a speech by the President of the American Psychiatric Association who predicted psychiatrists would be at the forefront of emerging brain science, and derive power and wealth from that close proximity. But I've never heard a psychiatrist in any similar position predict that the profession would benefit from its proximity to the emerging science of the soul.

Ironically, now the psychedelic drug cult tries to admonish all of us that we have some moral duty to turn on, tune in and drop out. It's the latest version of the "mental health awareness" imperative, and perhaps akin to the vaccine imperative. The next thing we know, we'll be getting cancelled for not agreeing that LSD should be widely available to everyone for the salvation of the world!

I recently read The Beginner's Guide to Ketamine Therapy for mental health, by Leah Benson, LMHC, Ed.M. (Leah Benson, LMHC, Ed.M.: Tampa, FL, 2023). This book has the character of holy scripture for psychedelic religion. It has a post-dedication page with a quote from Aldous Huxley's Collected Essays. But a Forward by Kazi "Zayn" Hassan, M.D. states that Ketamine is "...the biggest breakthrough in psychiatry in the last 50 years," and positions the psychedelic renaissance, IV ketamine clinics, non-profits like Rick Doblin's MAPS, and institutions like Johns Hopkins together along with Yale Department of Psychiatry.

Hassan cites a need "...to soften and reorganize the mind through psychedelic transformation." Some of us might recall the MKUltra work of such luminaries as Richard Helms, Sid Gottlieb, Ewen Cameron, Harry Baily, and Joly West from the 1950's and 60's. Those guys were all about softening and reorganizing minds, too--but their agenda was dark!

Leah Benson's book is distributed free by a recently established LLC called Brain Health Restoration of Illinois (BHR), located near Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg. I got a tour of their clinic recently, and spoke for about an hour with two staff, Michael McCully and Alexis Magat, who were very gracious hosts. Michael mainly runs the delivery of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) treatment at BHR. He didn't seem to be 100% enthusiastic about Ketamine assisted therapy, but he had impressive anecdotes for the value of TMS. 

I told these guys I had seen an article entitled "The Truth About Ketamine" in Sheridan Road magazine, written by one of the founders of their clinic. I had emailed Dustin O'Regan, the Managing Editor of the magazine, to complain that the article tried to say I-V Ketamine is approved by the FDA for treatment resistant depression, which is not true. Michael McCully quickly agreed with me when I read the offending paragraph aloud to him. He lamented that the statement had somehow gotten past his proofreading, and said he would recommend that the company should publish a correction, because BHR absolutely does not want to disseminate false information about their treatments.

A day  or two later, I had a very pleasant phone conversation with Terry Yormak and Karen Todd, who are both known as founders of BHR. Terry is also the author of the article which appeared in Sheridan Road. They agreed that there should be some sort of published retraction. I will have to leave that to them and J.W. Conatser, the magazine publisher. 

It's interesting that the entrepreneurs and enthusiasts in the so-called "psychedelic reanaissance" are generally in agreement that psychiatry, or at least the established, orthodox, APA-types in the profession, are mostly bad psychiatry. They prescribe drugs that are bad for their patints, and they almost universally fail to help people because they are only trying to control behaviors that people are afraid of or don't like. They largely depend on coercion for their customers. They're not really even trying to free people or heal them. The people pushing psychedelics on the other hand, are into expanding consciousness, evolutionary spiritual leaps, saving the world, etc. They are supposedly the latest and greatest chance for a good psychiatry.

In all likelihood, psychedelics will ruin psychiatry as any kind of scientific medical specialty. Even such a fossilized extremist as Jeffrey Lieberman knows that. The "renaissance" will bring back such horrors as Manson family murders and Jonestown, but many times more, because the cultural setting today is far darker than it was in the 1960's. People like Jeffrey Lieberman and (I'm sorry to say) Dustin O'Regan, Michael McCully, Terry Yormak and Karen Todd will end up all in the same, blamed boat. Right now they think they are so different from, or even the antithesis of, MKUltra and the Nazi doctors and Manhattan Project scientists, from whom Tim Leary, Ken Kesey and Augustus Owsley Stanley III actually inherited their evil.

But we cannot doctor the soul. We can only communicate as souls, with souls. This means that the study of the mind and the healing of mentally caused ills should not be alienated from religion or condoned in non-religious fields. 

And just incidentally, we cannot eliminate the soul. It is the only thing we cannot eliminate. (Brains on the other hand, are no problem.)

There is no good psychiatry, and we need not say psychiatry is bad.

Existential Confusion: America on psychedelics

"Existential confusion" is frequently said to be a possible negative side effect of psychedelic drugs. I think the phrase mostly means you are suddenly uncertain about who you are, where you are, what's real, what you're doing in the world and why.

Psychiatrists intentionally confuse their patients about who they are, where they are, what's real, what they're doing in the world and why. It's seen as a fundamental method to control people (e.g., gaslighting), and psychiatric patients are believed to be in great need of control, because they threaten and offend others. Hence, psychedelic drugs would seem to be a natural "treatment" in psychiatry.

The irony is that psychedelic drugs will ruin psychiatry utterly. Confusion is the antithesis of control, because it doesn't merely cause a person whose actions others don't like to become less active and therefore less trouble. The anatomy of control is start, change, and stop. (If you can start, change and stop something at will, you control that thing.) Psychedelics render a person unable to start, change, or stop anything, especially his/her own mind. I have written that the essence of these drugs is best expressed in two words: NO CONTROL!

One of the three biggest problems the FDA recently had with the research behind Lycos' MDMA application was "placebo unblinding," which meant there was NO CONTROL (group).

The facilitators in some instances crossed boundaries and abused patients during trials. There was evidently NO CONTROL of sexuality. (Perfect for the psychiatric slave plantations in Illinois, by the way!)

I have heard a former President of the American Psychiatric Association predict that the moment a psychedelic drug is approved to treat mental disorder, there will be NO CONTROL of the quality or supply of the drug; rapidly exploding demand will (as with the ongoing example of Ketamine) assure that regulators will have NO CONTROL over street (non-clinical) use.

Now that Rick Doblin's bucket-list life ambition, of FDA approval for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy to treat PTSD is thoroughly shot down, the next plan will be psilocybin for depression. Two bio-tech companies, Compass Pathways and Usona Institute are already in Phase 3 trials. Right behind them, Mindmed is in a Phase 2b trial of LSD for anxiety(!) and atai Life Sciences is working on DMT for depression. Approval of any psychedelic drug to treat mental disorder will replay the Ketamine disaster. Hundreds of "clinics" will spring up overnight, the drug will be everywhere. But collateral damage from psilocybin alone will be many times what Ketamine is causing, and LSD will dwarf all previous negative impacts put together. 

Anyone who wants a taste of what "America on psychedelics" may look like should watch a YouTube video of an interview of two supposed proponents of medical psychedelic drugs. They both seem so existentially and ardently confused that neither even knows the other may be an ally, and apparently presumes anyone encountered must be an enemy. They don't know what their own positions even are, or why they should argue with anyone. It's worse than the current national political scene, and it's the last thing this society needs right now!

We all need to walk around, get our bearings, look at real walls and touch them, not hallucinate that the walls are breathing, not conjure the interdimensional demons. Psychotomimetics are not vitamins.

Willie Nelson sings, "The world's gone crazy and it seems to get worse every day, so come on back Jesus, and pick up John Wayne on the way."

Plasticine porters with looking glass ties, the girl with kaleidoscope eyes, invite insanity.

Ribbon cutting ceremony today!

 

 

"Psychiatry,: An Industry of Death" museum exhibit on State Street

 ALL ARE INVITED!!!

This exhibit will be at 114 South State Street in downtown Chicago from August 13 until August 22.. It got rave reviews in NY City during the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in May. Don't miss it.

Anyone from EMHC who intends to go, let me know when and I'll show up and buy you some Starbucks or something. I'd love to know your impressions of this exhibit.

RK

Spensuril Halftail's First Amendment rights

 A recent article by Jonathon Turley seems compelling to me, on the subject of freedom of speech. This is Turley's whole raison d' être, and his entire reference point for any and all political analysis.

In my family, and in my community, there is a clear majority of serious Democrats, who have basically bought the campaign line (or legitimate fear) holding that Donald Trump poses a mortal threat to our democracy. I am more afraid of the scenario Turley writes about, but I certainly am not a Trumper. In exercising my right to vote (which I consider a very important responsibility), I have frequently gone for one or another third-party candidate. 

But while out to dinner with friends the other evening, I was so injudicious as to pose a pure hypothetical, which got me into a truly shocking amount of social difficulty. I said that I was so against the Harris-Walz ticket that I would be tempted, if I lived in Michigan or Pennsylvania, to do such a horrible deed as vote for Trump. My point, which I incorrectly believed would be obvious to these people, was not that I am favorable to Trump, but only that I am very unfavorable to the Democratic ticket. In Illinois it hardly matters who you vote for because the Democrat will certainly win. I told my friends I was really glad I live in Illinois, so I can't be tempted to do such a horrible deed as vote for Trump. In Michigan or Pennsylvania, critical electoral votes are realistically up for grabs, so one would have to be more responsible, and even consider the lesser-of-two-evils evaluation.

Somehow, the only thing these people heard me say was that I might vote for Trump. Horror of horrors! I was suddenly a Trumper, a fascist/racist/misogynist/transphobic/homophobic neanderthal, completely unfit for mixed company! People who are family, or as close as family to me, argued they didn't even know who I was, and this single comment had more or less completely changed our relationship. There was a  clearly implied demand that I retract what I had said, or what they said I had said, which was not what I had intended to say at all.

I reacted pretty badly in my turn. Maybe that's kind of predictable for any political conversation these days. This dinner table slapdown became a kind of denial of my free speech, or at least I felt that way at the time. When I read that Turley article this morning, it inspired me to go back to the text of the First Amendment, because I recalled that it guarantees four separate freedoms, of which freedom of speech and the press is only one (not even the first-mentioned, which would be freedom of religion).

The truth is, the United States of America was a breakthrough idea, with the Bill of Rights becoming the seed for all our subsequent prosperity, all our spiritual motivation, all our personality as a nation.

Now many people say times have changed: the existential questions are about climate, equity, artificial intelligence, social media, mental health, science... not freedom of speech. Those who say that are wrong. It was the American ideals of freedom and human dignity that enabled the highly improbable abolition of slavery in the 19th Century despite the overwhelming practical fact, that King Cotton financed a system of corruption and greed to continuously deliver riches and unassailable political power to slaveholders. 

Abraham Lincoln didn't free the slaves by abolishing Habeas Corpus, instituting a military draft, prosecuting dissenters, and letting Billy-the-Torch Sherman march from Atlanta to the sea (although he is properly remembered by history for all of those questionable acts): Lincoln freed the slaves by hearkening back to Americans' revolutionary sense of fundamental rights which made everyone free in a new way. He called for a new birth of freedom at Gettysburg, but he was still prepared, nearly a year and a half after that elegant sermon, with cannon balls still flying and brothers still killing brothers, to sink all the wealth piled by two hundred and fifty years of toil and repay every drop of blood drawn with the lash by another drawn with the sword.

Times have not changed for freedom of speech. The American people ultimately gave up their peculiar institution of chattel slavery as an arbitrary act of their own will (however fraught), despite its empirical utility and the obvious material value built on the backs of unrequited bondsmen. We made that change because we were firm in the right as God gave us to see the right. Can we remain so firm now? Can we still believe that all men have the inalienable right to think freely, to talk freely, to write freely their own opinions and to counter or utter or write upon the opinions of others?

One force says no with huge authority: psychiatry says we can't allow freedom of thought and freedom of speech anymore in the modern world, we cannot and must not resist the machines, the money, the gaslighting, however they undermine, dishonor and degrade our culture. Psychiatry tells us we are brains, nothing more than brains, just mud. Psychiatry's "experts" insist they know more about us than we know about ourselves. They say we must take their drugs and respect their sacred artifacts (which they call diagnoses).

I have a beautiful, big Airedale terrier named Spensuril Halftail. He barks incessantly every morning at early walkers on the beach, and wakes up the neighbors. Sometimes he gets anxious, and he growls menacingly at guests, even kids, who reach for him in ways he doesn't like. Twice, he bit somebody.

I adore Spensur, he's my friend. But he doesn't have First Amendment rights. I stop him from barking sometimes, and suppress his enthusiasms or protests if I consider them too fierce. I don't think twice about that, he's a step down from a human being, he has no human rights as a dog. I love him, but if he upsets people or makes them afraid or hurts them, I will take his freedom away and I might kill him.

Malis, Corcoran, Hussain, Sharpe and their ilk have (at best) the same relationship with their "patients" as I have with my dog. Even Vik Gill, a decent guy, knows that Gus has to be discouraged from complaining too much. There is no freedom of thought or speech for psychiatric slaves: they are subhuman by at least a couple fifths.

The reason for varying views of how to divide life is not so much politics or avarice, let alone biology. It's willingness and ability to communicate. If you can change another's behavior with a loving glance, or a knowing wink or a smile, or kind encouragement, you will naturally prefer that mode to an angry snarl or an assault, or prison bars. Those with whom you can find agreement, and come to like and understand, without violence, will naturally seem entitled to rights like freedom of thought/speech, that you will grant and respect.

The FDA's disapproval of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy last week is a fascinating study. By most accounts, the problem with the proposal from Lycos Therapeutics was the psychotherapy element of the treatment, not the drug. The FDA has never regulated psychotherapy. They don't understand communication by itself, they only specialize in what they imagine are molecules of the mind, and they know those tiny particles of dead matter can't communicate at all.

The FDA made the right decision for the wrong reason. They expect drugs to work and be safe, but they have no interest or jurisdiction with regard to live communication as a method of healing.

Psychiatrists and the FDA should confine themselves to veterinary professions and leave people alone.

But I should communicate better with friends and Spensuril Halftail.